Follow the Fire
by Spring Zephyr
Summary: Kai and the aftermath of losing Wyatt.


**This was a Beyblade Burst fanfiction until I remembered someone dies canonically in V-Force and rewrote it. Rewriting it was actually rather difficult, because, well, Wyatt appears in maybe five or six episodes. In half of them, he's already dead (or hospitalized, in the English dub) so it's a bit difficult to fill in the gaps of Kai's grieving because there aren't many to be filled and his guilt/grief is mostly sidelined by the ensuing revenge quest.**

 **On that note, I never explicitly say Wyatt died in this story, so it could be canon to either the original or the dub.**

Rays of sunlight landed on the edge of his bed in streaks, partially filtered by the dusty blinds. The clock on Kai's bedside dresser displayed 8:36 in bold red lettering, ticked to 8:37 before he finally looked away to the pile of laundry on his floor. Weirdly enough, Wyatt probably would have picked that up.

'Nothing says "idolization" like doing someone else's laundry,' Kai thought sardonically. At least he wasn't too tired to be sardonic. He shut his eyes and vaguely remembered something Wyatt had said about his mother being a stickler for cleanliness, something Kai had deemed totally irrelevant at the time.

It was a normal Saturday morning. The only difference was that Wyatt was gone.

With a sigh, Kai rolled onto his other side. He didn't normally sleep well, but at the moment there was nothing he wanted to do more.

X

The atmosphere at school changed on Monday, when the announcement was made. Faculty spent the first ten minutes of class cleaning out Wyatt's desk, and for the first time since Kai's initial enrollment, someone other than Wyatt noticed him.

Dealing with the praise and admiration heaped upon him for making it all the way to the Russia finals in the last tournament was hard enough, but the stony look in his eyes and the lack of responsiveness was not enough to ward off the choruses of "I'm sorry" following him all day. He'd gone to school to be productive, but all it had accomplished was placing an ever ending loop of "sorry sorry sorry" in his head, voices attached to faces he couldn't have recognized and wouldn't have remembered even on a better day.

If he closed his eyes, the voices morphed and blended together into Wyatt's and he saw the boy's dying face all over again, the exhausted rings under his eyes like bruises and the smile behind chapped lips that is all teeth and not at all what Wyatt's normal smile is like. "I'm sorry" this imaginary Wyatt said, and Kai almost kicked himself after nearly asking out loud "for what?" in the middle of class. The teacher noticed and offered to excuse him; he declined.

He was afraid that if they didn't stop, his memories of that moment would continue to twist themselves until there is nothing left of the truth. Solidifying his current status as an almost comedic mess of contradictions, he both wanted that scene out of his of his head and to preserve it for an eternity. It was his fault, after all, and it was only fair.

At the end of the day, the class president, a girl with a thin smile and thin fingers and thin, thin hair, approached him and said, "If you ever need to talk..."

Kai hastily turned on heel and let the door close behind him before she could finish her sentence. It figured, that he would spend two extra minutes in the classroom and receive an extra large dose of fake sympathy in return. Her voice was thin too, and her intentions were thinnest of all, and there was so little substance to them that anyone could have seen through the gaping holes. It was a waste of time to speculate why she'd become president in the first place – needed an ego boost, lost a bet – but it was the kind of thing Wyatt would have thought about. Wyatt, being the last thing Kai wanted on his mind right now, was of course the first and foremost.

He wanted to talk.

He did not want to talk.

What he wanted was to talk with someone who would understand his perspective, wouldn't waste their breath pretending it wasn't his fault like Tyson or the other Bladebreakers would, but also weren't as numb and familiar towards death as the Blitzkrieg Boys. If he told any of them, they could only try to understand and wouldn't.

X

Wyatt didn't haunt only his thoughts. He appeared in his dreams as well, pain and madness hollowing out the life from the other boy's eyes when they inevitably turned to nightmares filled with gibberish and weak laughter. _"You don't stand a chance, Kai! Against me!"_

Naturally, Kai felt a sense of personal responsibility over what had happened. In a cruel twist of fate, Wyatt had accomplished exactly what he'd wanted – to successfully convince Kai to leave retirement. Watching Dunga battle had been exhilarating, exciting in a way that amateur fans like Wyatt never could be. 

But if Kai had hidden Dranzer better, maybe Wyatt never would have fought Dunga the first time and that would have been enough to prevent the rest of this from happening. If Team Psykick hadn't taken advantage of Wyatt's desperation to prove himself, this _definitely_ wouldn't have happened.

Team Psykick were the real scum. Every time the Bladebreakers saw them, they were either sending team members to steal Bitbeasts or using human beings as test subjects – Boris would have been proud of their ventures into villainy, because that wasn't exactly the modus operandi for the good guys.

Every time he woke in a cold sweat, it was to the reminder of how badly those Psykick researchers deserved to pay for what they had done.

Sometimes Wyatt's gentle pleas woke him instead, telling Kai it wasn't his fault, that he'd been too hasty and he was sorry for having taken Dranzer and being naïve enough to trust Gideon and Doctor B afterward. Maybe not in so many words. Exiting the hazy stupor of dreams tampered with Kai's memory a bit, but when he woke up both times remembering how disobedient Dranzer had been toward Wyatt the first time he'd fought Dunga, it was the only thing that made sense. Wyatt had been overeager, but not stupid – he'd probably known Team Psykick was offering him something too good to be true, and still decided the risk outweighed the reward. Kai had known more about the group than Wyatt, and even he'd been unaware that a Cyber Bitbeast could hurt someone so permanently.

"I can't believe those creeps played him like that."

His skin crawled with the notion that he'd played along, let himself forget Team Psykick's role in this for even a second. Kai wasn't perfect – nobody was – but he wouldn't have dangled dangerously false hope in Wyatt's face either.

"But just wait..."

On the contrary, Kai was a person defined by logic. With the guard rail and the tower viewer as his only witnesses, he growled out loud the only conclusion that made any sense:

"I'll get my revenge."


End file.
